Roland Hanna

The Detroit jazz scene of the late 1920s and early 30s spawned a crop of unusually characterful keyboard players, of whom the pianist Sir Roland Hanna, who has died aged 70, was perhaps the most broadly endowed. The knighthood was conferred on him by the president of Liberia.

"Hanna is a buoyant, resplendent pianist," wrote the critic Whitney Balliett. "He uses a great many chords and baroque melody lines, and he likes to keep coming to climaxes."

Though his early career was often obscured by the self-effacement of accompanying roles, Hanna made a creatively individual impact on such high-profile bands as Charles Mingus's, and the celebrated Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra. As the years passed, his playing deepened in subtlety and scope, and, as the market for "classic jazz" expanded in the 1990s, he became widely respected as a performing archivist of many endangered piano styles, though, like his contemporary Tommy Flanagan, his lines were often uncannily accurate reflections of the pacing and shape of bop saxophone solos.

Hanna was first taught by his father at the age of 11; he also played the alto saxophone in high school. After military service, he took up with trumpeter Thad Jones at the Bluebird Inn, Detroit, in 1952, and then went to the Eastman music school for a year. He gave up in frustration at the exclusion of jazz, and, by 1955, had moved to the Juilliard School, in New York, graduating in 1960 after taking breaks to tour with Benny Goodman and play at the 1958 Newport jazz festival.

Hanna's theoretical sophistication and technical fluency made him a creative sideman in many styles, and he regularly appeared with the imperious, harmonically advanced swing saxophonist Coleman Hawkins on the American television series Art Ford's Jazz Party. From time to time, he played with Charles Mingus in the early 1960s, when the bandleader was at a peak in balancing composition against a jazz ensemble's collective spontaneity.

Hanna also played with singer Sarah Vaughan and Duke Ellington's vocalist Al Hibbler, led his own piano trio in New York, and reconnected with Hawkins - who favoured the Detroit pianists - for touring work in the saxophone giant's last decade.

In 1968 and 1969, Hanna toured Europe and Africa as a soloist, and donated more than $100,000 to Liberian education - a gesture for which the country knighted him in 1970. But during that decade, he became increasingly overlooked, as jazz-funk fusion became the dominant fashion. He taught piano, and formed the New York Jazz Sextet to protect the acoustic jazz principles and legacy of past heroes. As a quartet, the group (including George Mraz on bass, and Billy Hart on drums) worked on into the 1980s, and Hanna also featured in small groups led by the former Miles Davis bassist Ron Carter.

In 1987, with a series of fine recordings, including the unaccompanied session Round Midnight, he reminded the jazz world of what a powerful force he remained, both as an improviser and a distinctive and broadminded composer. Prelude, from the Round Midnight session, was one of his originals, first written for a cello soloist.

In 1988, he worked on the soundtrack to the Clint Eastwood biopic of Charlie Parker, Bird!, playing updated piano parts to Parker's original solos. He was also drawn back to Mingus's unruly music (the bassist/ composer had died in 1979) in various legacy bands, including MingusDynasty, and, in 1989, in the extended orchestra that premiered a long-lost, large-scale Mingus composition, Epitaph.

In the 1990s, Hanna toured unaccompanied - he played a scintillating solo tribute to Errol Garner at Carnegie Hall in 1993 - as well as with trios, and with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. 1993 also saw the release of his Maybeck Recital Hall album, a confirmation of how successfully the piano legacies of Tommy Flanagan, Errol Garner and Thelonious Monk could co-exist with melodic and harmonic notions more attributable to 20th-century classical composers.

He is survived by his wife, two sons and two daughters.

· Roland Hanna, jazz pianist, born February 10 1932; died November 13 2002